He knew as he wept bitter tears into his blood-stained hands that his reign was at an end.
There were indeed, for the time at any rate, no more “rags,” and Peter might, an he would, have reigned magnificently over the Lower School. But he was as silent and aloof as ever, and was considered “a sidey devil, but jolly plucky, by Gad.”
And for himself he got at any rate the more continued companionship of Cards, who languidly, and, perhaps a younger Sir Willoughby Patterne “with a leg,” admired his muscle.
IV
Finally, towards the end of the term, Peter and Bobby Galleon may be seen sitting on a high hill. It is a Sunday afternoon in spring, and far away there is a thin line of faintly blue hills. Nearer to view there are grey heights more sharply outlined and rough, like drawing paper—painted with a green wood, a red-roofed farm, a black church spire, and a brown ploughed field. Immediately below them a green hedge hanging over a running stream that has caught the blue of the sky. Above them vast swollen clouds flooding slowly with the faint yellow of the coming sunset, hanging stationary above the stream and seeming to have flung to earth some patches of their colour in the first primroses below the hedge. A rabbit watches, his head out of his hole.
The boys' voices cut the air.
“I say, Bobby, don't you ever wonder about things—you never seem to want to ask questions.”
“No, I don't suppose I do. I'm awfully stupid. Father says so.”
“It's funny your being stupid when your father's so clever.”
“Do you mind my being stupid?”